I was sitting at my parents piano in Boulder, Colorado at 6am on an August morning looking ahead to a long day of air travel with my two boys back to the Hudson Valley, NY where we live.

I closed my eyes and began to play, recording the piece with my phone as it came floating by. The recording is rough and you can hear the trash truck rolling by, but the moment was sweet and I just happened to capture it.

Revisiting the recording this morning I was reminded of the essential role that music plays in my life. While I have made my living in music since I was 15, at this point in my life  music for me is not about making money, sounding great, or being recognized. Its about communication, therapy, and tapping into something larger than I can conceive of with my conscious mind.

As I listened to my recording today a rush of emotions came flooding back, feelings of love and yearning for my family and a life I left behind and it sparked a much bigger conversation in my head that I will now attempt to lay down to virtual paper.

The Larger Conversation

Ask any musician and they will tell you that the material value or music has been slipping for a long time. For most musicians who have been in the game for a long time, the game changed drastically after 9/11. Clubs stopped giving bands guarantees, CD Sales began their inevitable slog to obscurity, and fans of music started to look to new ways to find and share their music. 

But while there's no doubt its been a tough ride for the professional musician over the past decade, there is much to be thankful for in the ruins of the wildfire that swept through and destroyed the industry. New technologies have emerged like flowers from a fire, and from that devastation grows a new awareness of the importance of music and art in our lives.

It has to be hard for a young musician to find any sort of sustainable future in music. Competition is fierce, almost anybody can make a recording, and there are less and less ways to make money.

But you know, it was hard in the 70's, it sucked in the 80's, and the 90's and early 2000's were crooked and unsustainable. Through each decade we've learned a bit more and I truly believe we are moving back to the natural and functional purpose of music which is to enrich community; to make people dance, sing, laugh and cry. Music is a language that we use to communicate with one another, its a prism through which we interpret the world. Even in a world where nobody makes a dime from music, its value to humanity is immeasurable.

The performers:

Sophia Quon - Violin Vocals (Lead Vocals on last Chorus)
Schuyler Press - Guitar, Vocals (Lead Vocals on 1st Verse)
Madi Guski - Vocals, (Lead Vocals on 2nd Verse)
Anabel DeMartino - Bongos, Vocals (Lead Vocals on 3rd Verse)
Miles DeMartino - Clavinet & Organ
Silas Walker - Bass

Redemption Song by Community Music Space

 Right now ity is available for download and you can name your price...

Tear That Building Down by Ben Senterfit

At this point we've been glorifying musicians for a long time. Since Elvis and The Beatles (or you could argue Mozart and Beethoven) certain musicians have been elevated to the mantle of genius, star, and that ubiquitous term of musical achievement, "Idol". But any professional musician who has had his feet in the biz for a while has stories of the absurdities and excess that goes along with the success. More importantly, for most working musicians the idea of becoming a star is not at the top of the list. The larger question is, how do I make a sustainable living from the years of practice, performance, recording and schlepping gear? As the perception of the "successful" musician continues to come into sharper contrast with the realities of making a living in music it seems a good time to rethink the larger question what is the role of musician in our culture today?

A Touch Of History

While we spent the majority of the 20th century crowning (and dethroning) the kings and queens of music, the economic winds have certainly shifted. Traditionally the role of the musician has been to administer the rites of passage; marriages, funerals, ceremonies (both spiritual and secular) and to create the musical soundtrack through which daily life progresses. Music has always functioned as a cultures conduit for gathering, praying, protesting, and yes, partying.

The commodification of music on the other hand is a relatively new phenomenon. Since the 1960's the focus of the musician has shifted to the unrealistic concept of "Making it". Musicians throw themselves into any situation, sign contracts, sell songs, give their music away for the opportunity to one day get a grand reward that they can sit on. But shouldn't the ultimate goal to have a sustainable, balanced, and expressive existence? For the musicians that actually tip the scale and become idolized for being musical, the rewards come with a cost (insert any episode of VH1 Behind The Music here).

Honoring The Musician

Yes, its great to be honored for what you do, we all want to feel like we are valued for what we do, but do we really need to create special engagements to honor musicians? Why does the musician need to be honored any more than the Carpenter or the nurse? Because we're creative? because we make music?

The reality is that while an incredibly small percentage of musicians are hoisted above the rest and admired from afar, the majority of talented professionals find it harder and harder to make a living wage. Moreover, the people shaping the standards adhered to by the music industry are made up primarily of non-musicians (management companies, publishers, labels & lawyers) who have distorted the view of what a musician should look, act, and sound like. 

The Narcissistic Musician

But it would be naive and oversimplifying the situation to blame the business. At some point musicians need to look in the mirror and ask themselves, How do I effect the world around me? Having an ego is an essential ingredient in any performance. The performer has to believe to some extent that what they are doing is worth someone else time. This is not necessarily a bad thing. However, the prevailing attitude in the modern day musician is a creeping self importance that disconnects them from and inevitably isolates them from their audience and their community.

The Way Forward

It is essential that musicians today not only reach out to their audience through social media and networking, but also share their skills and perspectives with people around you, specifically to the younger generation. The reality is, if you want a career in music you need to be more than a triple talent threat, you also need to be a successful person. It starts with your music - we must be perpetual students - but we must also have a grasp of the business, social media, education, and the most essential ingredient of all, compassion. In today's environment it isn't enough to know how to play the saxophone. You have to have a keen awareness of technology, communication, and basic social skills. Most of all you need to reach out to people around you and share your love of music with other musicians, fans, friends, and family. The mono-directional, rockstar, touring musician is a dying breed - there isn't the infrastructure to support it. The more we reach out to the world around us, the more opportunity and energy we receive.

Then I pulled out Imagine by John Lennon and immediately she popped up. Within 5 minutes she had picked up the chords and sung through the melody as I played the chords. In the week that followed, she memorized the lyrics, nailed the chord progression and entered the school talent show with a friend playing the piano part. Now we're focusing on learning a harmony part and some arranging ideas, she is on fire!

Nature vs Nurture

It always brings up some interesting questions for me as a educator and even more as a music lover. How much of her reaction was based on the fact that she recognized Imagine and not Bobby Mcgee and how much is something more intangible that we don't really understand?

While it would be convenient to say that recognizable songs are more appealing than the unknown, it feels like there is something more at play here. When I introduced Bobby Mcgee (which I picked because it had easy chords, good melody, and a strong female version to go off) there was an immediate, physical reaction in her, almost a repulsion. Earlier in the year we had learned the melody to the Irish song St. Anne's reel - a song she had never heard - and she diligently worked on it for months without protest. 

What we know about ourselves 

We all know that there are songs that resonate in us and others that raise the hair on our neck. It is something that everybody feels, something that we don't need to explain, it just happens. There are those moments that reflect our coming of age, define a generation (which both of these songs accomplished in the 1970's) or that represent something we love, or hate, about the world around us. But what about that intangible feeling that just turns us on or off?

I'm sure there are some scientific studies out there that can point in on direction or another, but this is something that I see consistently as an educator with kids and adults and I don't have answers for. I would love to hear what you think!

One of my favorite things to do is to wax philosophical about music. As a result my touring band-mates in an earlier incarnation of my life nicknamed me Soapbox Senterfit.

These days, I live in the country and tend to do my philosophizing on the phone with the musical crew of the Cuebro Producers. We call each other with some sort of musical question, issue, or opportunity and end up two hours down the road deeply entrenched, usually discussing one central idea; The Constant Guines Pig.

Embracing Discomfort

The guinea pig is the animal symbol for all things experimented on. Musically, the Constant Guinea Pig pertains to someone who is constantly experimenting, fiddling, and tweaking to find new sounds, forms, tones, technologies, or tempos to musics great questions. It is also a way to keep from getting too comfortable with your surroundings.

After years of working in studios, teaching, gigging, and doing many things creative, it has become clear to me that discomfort is an essential element to the creative process. We all know the stories of the bands that were so amazing when they were young and hungry that then become a bore to their fans once they reach a certain moniker of comfort. Who cares that Sting can have sex for 8 hours in a row, he hasn't written a good song since he was an angst filled punk in The Police.

Getting caught in a trap you set

Embracing the guinea pig has become more and more essential partly because we are living through a technological revolution. Every month it seems there is a new game changing tecnology that offers new ways of being creative. Each new platform creates new opportunities that inevitably make things that we considered essential, obsolete.

The most direct example in studio recording is the digital audio plug-in. While I cut my teeth in the 1980's and 90's working on analog tape, the evil forces of digital technology were slowly eroding the philosophies we had developed as to what were good recording practices. How were we to know that 10 years later, the mp3 would rule the airwaves or that artists would have top selling recordings they had made in a project studio in their basement. All we thought was, tape is the best, it has to be on tape or else it's shit. Now here I am combing over plug-in's that best emulate that sound I once thought was only possible one way...Gotta be a Gonstant Guinea Pig.

Never Getting Stuck

It's easy to get stuck creatively as you get older. When you are in your twenties everything you do seems to glisten, if you lose one good idea, another comes right behind it. As we age, our minds begin to calcify and we compartmentalize based on what has or hasn't worked and we shovel new opportunites into those compartments. This is another reason it is essential to constantly break yourself open, experiment, start over, poke, prod, eliminate, and re-instate.

If you are going to be a student of something throughout your life, its important to realize that while the thing that you do doesn't necessarily change, you do. Your mind grows, your values change, your skills grow or shrink, and how you think about what you do changes constantly. For that reason, we must always be...a Constant Guinea Pig.

Many stereotypes that people have regarding musicians are pretty right on. We tend to be night owls, we're often late, and generally have some sort of a stain somewhere on our gig outfit. However, one quality that tends to go unnoticed is the ability to make due with what you have. This is definitely true in the tale our young Production Label Cuebro.

The Cuezone Brotherhood

In 2008, when I moved with my family to New York from Colorado, I was pretty much a stay at home dad. I had run a record label (Cuezone Records) with my friend, and musical compatriot, Jarad Astin for a decade and we had a lot of really well recorded music that wasn't going anywhere. So we teamed up with longtime friend and studio wizard Kyle Jones (Sleeping Brotherhood Studios) and masterful musician/comedian Jake Sanders to form Cuebro Productions. Originally the idea was to put our music into a number of emerging on line licensing chains and to begin work on hundreds of new tracks that were running through our collective minds. Because I was home a lot, I had the opportunity to begin the long work of publishing, copyrighting, and classifying our catalog. And because we were all in different Cities we set up an FTP server where we could all share songs we were working on in our respective project studios.

Transformation

Affordable studio technologies had made it possible for each of us to have a project studio (except for Mr. Jones substantial Brotherhood Studios) and to transfer files back and forth via ftp servers online, allowing us to be versatile and quick with our work.

The emergence of third party licensing companies and social networking sites had also created an opportunity to get our music heard and placed. I wasn't too excited about the idea of licensing songs to Walmart or Nike but we had bills to pay and plenty of inspired recordings to pull from.  Within a year we had scored a national TV spot for a Corona Ad and come close on a number of other big ads.

Making it Visual

I was also fortunate to reconnect with an old student of mine Rob Miller at The Design Loophole, who is an amazing web designer and together we mashed together ideas of what this company could look like.

What has emerged is something between a production studio and a label. We are consistently putting out new "artist content" while also pulling together production music for commercial use. The snapshot above is a nice tool Rob built that allows fans of our artists to download free tracks in exchange for a tweet, Facebook Like or email subscription. In this way we build our presence online and allow fans to connect directly with the artists on their computer, their mobile phone, and of course at the show.

The Way Forward

Whether or not this is profitable remains to be seen but we have built our foundation and now the goal it to do what we know how to do, write, record, and play our music. We started the business over two years ago and are just now getting all of our ducks in a row. The other reality is that we all still make our money doing other things, be it teaching, studio work, or in Jarad Astin's case managing the snakes and lizards at The Brooklyn Children's museum.

So far this has been an amazing experiment and I'm look forward to seeing where it goes. Take a look at Cuebro Version 2.0, please let us know what you think.